


the way we look like animals

by paxlux



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-10 09:20:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paxlux/pseuds/paxlux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's an evolutionary necessity. There always is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the way we look like animals

**Author's Note:**

> _Sorry  about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine._

There's an evolutionary necessity. There always is.

The teeth resembling the incisors, their next door neighbors in the cave of the mouth, the ones situated below the eyes. The canines: they are the weapons when no other weapons are available.

They are cruelty at its finest for what other way can you inflict physical pain without the use of your limbs.

Hannibal stands at the edge of the crime scene, near a veritable lake of blood. He tilts his head at the smell, the decay of biological matter after death, though that isn't entirely accurate, there is life after death, in all things. Transformation.

"A vampiric delusion," Jack pronounces carefully, as if he's eating each word, making the statement a question without a change of inflection. One of the forensic techs makes a _rawr_ motion, mouth open, in an imitation grimace. Will shakes his head.

"No, he left the blood," he says and Hannibal hmms from where he's standing. With a huff of breath, low laughter, Will corrects himself, "He wasted the blood," glancing at Hannibal with a darkly sarcastic smirk. 

"Maybe the flavor wasn't to his liking," Hannibal suggests, folding his hands in an _I am merely observing_ gesture, and Jack sighs, but Will rolls his eyes. 

A cop waves a wallet, reads that the victim is Marshall Peeples, 28, from Sonoma, CA, everything looks good, not a robbery. Katz lifts a sheet from the bed (stiff red as a butcher's apron), says, "I guess he doesn't prefer the '85 pinot noir."

"Okay, so the killer used his teeth," Jack says, a little forceful, "is that all we know. I do not need a killer who thinks he's a blood-drinker and then changes his mind."

Stepping neatly around the ruined carpet, the blood soaked into the fibers in thick clumps, almost a topographical map, Hannibal lowers his voice, "I think it was more surprise than distaste."

Nodding, Will takes off his glasses, leaves his fingers pressed to his forehead. "He wants it, it's not even a choice, more of a, well, ‘compulsion’ isn't the right term, but an instinct, so he uses his teeth." His eyes lose focus, like the last time Hannibal saw Will covered in blood, as if it were a drug taken through the skin, the dark high transporting him somewhere else. 

"Nothing is more instinctive than to use one's mouth. Infants do it before they can even speak. They learn the world by tasting it." Hannibal licks his lips, sees Will do the same.   
"An oral fixation."

"Possibly."

"But Peeples didn't fight back. He looks." Jack checks over his shoulder at the body. "Asleep."

"Can you tell which teeth were used," Hannibal says and Jack smiles, indulgent, "I should think all of them," and Will replaces his glasses, shoves his hands in his pockets as Katz says, "Not yet, but I think the incisors."

Hannibal catches Will's eye and Will replies, "The canines. He drugged Marshall Peeples, then bit him. This is his first."

"The blood tells," Hannibal says. "He wasn't expecting it."

"Yes. He isn't used to, to it, the spray, he bit too deep too fast. The excitement."

"Became terror." Regrettably, Hannibal can believe it, those who aren't prepared and controlled sometimes go too far, slide the beautiful into the grotesque and they scare themselves. 

"He's new. Unskilled. Still perfecting," Will continues, picking up Hannibal's thought almost to the letter and this is what fascinates Hannibal, why he likes to work with Will, to see him as the profiler absorbing the kill, taking the dead air of a crime scene and turning it into living cinema. To see Will as himself, so naked and honest Hannibal can't bear to look at him. It enthralls Hannibal that no one else seems to notice this, Will's nudity in these moments, stripped to the bones and sinews, his muscles can barely hold him.

Jack makes a noise of irritated bemusement, "Would you like to train him. To be better than he is now."

Such poor taste, Hannibal thinks, and Will is distinctly disgusted, he over-enunciates as he replies, "I'm sure I could teach him to at least take the blood with him."

And Hannibal smiles behind a hand, surreptitiously lifted as if the smell has just hit him. This is the Will he likes, the one who has an untidy pun of a name, willpower, the will to power, the will and the way, the warrior of his name, Will Graham could meticulously kill everyone in the room and sleep on air-cooled sheets in contentment, listening to the breathing of his dogs. If only he didn't have the will to suffer guilt. If only.

"The canines are fangs," Hannibal explains, "they pierce prey and hold. He isn't in the delusional grip of parasitic nightmares" – Zeller waves a blue-gloved hand gone red to interrupt, “They’re creatures of the night, they’d be _awake_ ” – so Hannibal amends, “Or daydreams. It's an instinct all humans have evolved: we bite with our canines. To hold, then tear, then we shred with our incisors." He makes a gesture to his face, Jack and Will watching him as if he might tear at himself; he draws a line from his eye down to his mouth, curling his lip to show his own teeth. "The eyeteeth."

"We see, then we eat," Will says under his breath and Hannibal nods, replying low to make them listen to him, "Precisely."

Walking to the bed, Jack puts his hands on his hips, pushing his suit jacket back. "This isn't about the teeth, gentlemen. It's about the blood." The cheap plastic bucket by the bed is splattered but mostly empty.

"A crude transportation device," Hannibal says, dismissive, it is a _great_ waste, and he feels a little upset; if he could, he would copy this exact scene, show this inept, impotent killer how it should have happened, a body drained of its most precious resource, left cold and flaccid and unappealing.

Alas. He has neither the time nor the inclination. Though the idea of shoving the killer and Will forward in a death race ballet is utterly alluring. Like a fight to declare the winner, a fight to the death. A battle.

Will shivers, sweating, and Hannibal shrugs out of his coat; Jack caught him in the classroom, no time to get your things, just get in the car, Dr. Lecter will tell you all about it. He proffers it, a slow gesture to convey practicality, not pity. Will takes it, says, "Slightly ridiculous." 

"You are cold and staring at a body's worth of blood. Nothing ridiculous about it."

"Except everything."

"So." Jack has wandered back over to them. "Anything else I should know." His voice gives away his frustration though his face remains impassive. 

It annoys Hannibal, unsuitably. "I'm sure we can think of something, if you'd like. Should we make it up. Should we spout random facts at you like a two-headed Sherlock Holmes."

A shoulder presses against his, his own cologne mingled with Will's aftershave as Will gives that breath of laughter again, "Fiction. How about a fairy tale. Plenty of blood and gore..."

It's an intricate and fast companionship, partners-in-crime, and Hannibal laughs, feels a warm enjoyment.

Pointing at them, Jack doesn't say anything, just issues a warning with his chin, and Will says, "Check blood banks. Hospital inventories. Blood that’s gone missing. He's probably used to the bagged stuff."

Zeller says, "Shoulda tried organic.”

Will retorts, "It is organic."

Clicking his tongue, Hannibal murmurs, "Nothing makes up for fresh produce," and Will laughs, proper and full, and Katz says, "Yeah, I love dead bodies too. Bunch of comedians. They slay me."

Turning a tight defensive half-circle towards the door, Will makes a gesture under the jacket, his arms aren't in the sleeves, he says, "I'd like to go home. Feed my canines."

Hannibal says, "And your dogs," grinning when Will laughs again, a slight hysterical edge, and Jack looks at the ceiling, "Enough. Go away. I will see you both bright and early in the morning with something, I hope, more illuminating than dog jokes and unsanitary puns."

"Bright and early," Hannibal confirms as Will simply walks away, no response needed. 

He follows, watching the line of Will's body inside the coat, the swing of his stride and the hang of his hands from his wrists. His glasses catch the setting sun, a spread of red-gold taking his eyes and Hannibal savors it, the loss of Will's abhorred eye contact, hollowed and gone, leaving Will as a man without an agenda, pure with possibility.

It would take nothing: trust, understanding, companionship, affection. 

Loyalty. 

Instinct.

It would take nothing to push Will from his guilt that taints the beautiful Will admits he sees and twists it into the grotesque. Shame.

Will liked killing Garret Jacob Hobbes and he knows it and he said it out loud.

It's heady, Hannibal already imagines it, the classical art of the hunt, the pop art of lurid murder, it could be a renaissance, like the golden power days of Italy, inventing new forms of death and cruelty along the lines of an emerging school of art they would be the masters of, because murder is a point of perspective.

Ahead of him, Will has stopped, is waiting for Hannibal to catch up. He gives Hannibal a half-smile, tired. Slowly, Hannibal straightens the coat on Will's shoulders and like a reflex, Will slides his arms into the sleeves. The power lines overhead buzz faintly as they walk. 

At the car, Will pauses, circles stark under his eyes. 

"Dinner?" Hannibal presents it as a question since Will is still half in the crime scene.

He nods, says, "Sure, yes."

"Let's see what I have in my refrigerator." Something rich and tender, Hannibal thinks. It must be all the blood they were just in, he wants something dark that melts on the tongue. A liver, he has a liver, a non-drinker, non-smoker, a person conspicuously free of vice except for the way he sawed on his viola as if he were a lumberjack with rudimentary skills. A night of Holst ruined and betrayed.

It wouldn't take much, Will in the passenger seat, head resting against the window, it is exquisite as the sun gives way to streetlights. The flashes pass over him as if he is mythological, half in light, half in shadow, and in one of these, Hannibal can see the shape of Will’s skull.

There's an evolutionary necessity. The roots of the canines (dogteeth, eyeteeth, cuspids, the names hot on the tongue) sink deep into bone. The narwhal's canine erupts as the horn on its head, a vicious reminder of the simplest weapon system in nature. It's almost body horror, a tooth growing out of your head, but that's what the mouth is: a sheath of razors.

"Even I have a hard time imagining drinking from cold bags of blood," Will says. "Like leftover soup." 

"Gazpacho."

Will laughs, all breath. His glasses press crooked against the window as he yawns.

Evolutionary necessity. Hannibal needs to see the length of Will's fangs. 

He thinks of Will with blood up to his elbows, smeared into his skin, blood flecks on his face, his glasses, his mouth. 

He wants Will to show his teeth.

**Author's Note:**

>  _I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time._ Title and notes from Siken.


End file.
